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[mikewest]

Hi! Two friends and I finally decided to try our hands at making a flixel game after seeing some of the awesome stuff in the compos here.  So here's the alpha of our first game. None of us have any formal training in...well, anything game-related except for programming. 

So, any and all feedback will be fantastically helpful and would make us eternally grateful- particularly any feedback on emotional impact or, you know, lack thereof.

EDIT: Final version done (though we will probably have to fix any bugs if any arise).
 

Final Version:Convergence

The only keys are left/right (or A/D) and space.  It is a multiple ending game about exploring, making choices, and the world each person creates.  (There are three true endings, but two additional 'perfect' endings for playing the game certain ways.)

[TheLastBanana]

I played through to all of the endings. It's a nice little game. I made a little list of thoughts and impressions (or bug reports) that I had as I went through the game, so hopefully they'll be helpful to you - sorry if it comes across as a lot of criticism. Here they are in no particular order:

• You have to hold space and crawl up to the first table in the attic - if you get too close, you can't climb it. It's a bit confusing at first, and made me think I had encountered a bug.
• On my first playthrough, pressing space when standing next to Melissa at the party didn't do anything, so I had no choice but to go to work. I guess that must have been my conscience telling me to get my work finished.
• The game did a lovely job of the classic "show, don't tell" - I knew what my options were at any given time. Unfortunately, the text that popped up to tell you what you could do seemed a bit overboard. Without those, I think it would have felt a lot more like I was making a choice.
• Your mother seems to be a bit judgmental, considering that you're a baby. Maybe she could just tell you that she loves you when you go with her, instead of forecasting your future, and when you stay to play with your toys, she could mention that you're always playing with them.
• In the second part of the game, after staying with the toys, I was pressing space to get through all the papers and accidentally skipped the text at the end. In retrospect, that's actually kind of clever, since it's like you're just skimming the report and missing the information, but at first it felt like I had been cheated. Maybe the information could be presented in little snippets for each of the pages that you read, and unless you were paying attention, you wouldn't know what you were being asked on the phone later? Alternatively, if somebody had said to me after reading the report "boy, you read that quickly - are you sure you didn't miss anything?" I would have reconsidered what I was doing. Anyway, just a thought.
• I wasn't really sure why knocking all the pictures down when I was a baby made the bigger picture fall down, but I could tell that's what I needed to do. This isn't really a complaint, it just seemed a little odd.
• The screen faded out so quickly at the end of the love afternoon that I couldn't read what Melissa was saying.
• Where did my brother go? He was such an antagonist at first that it seemed odd that he just disappeared.

Whew, that was a long list. Hopefully it was informative. The game's endings were appropriate, and the Perfect Love ending was particularly nice - the bloom effect around the memories made them feel nostalgic, somehow.

[mikewest]

Awesome!  Thank you for taking the time to play the game and note your thoughts- it's a great, constructive list of what works and what doesn't.  We will definitely implement these changes (particularly the game breaking one where you can't talk to Melissa).  Breaking up the text while reading the papers sounds like a very solid idea- it would certainly make the press-space-to-read-papers more meaningful.

The brother...yeah, good point.  We used him as a tool in the first level, but did not find time to really integrate him elsewhere in the game.  Ideally, we'd have liked to integrate the gameplay from sunrise a bit more into the narrative as well.

I'm reading into your words a bit here, but I take it that the love ending was the one that sticks out in your mind?  How did you feel the endings stacked up against one another?

[TheLastBanana]

Spoiler warning!
Part of the reason that the love ending sticks with me the most is that it feels like a real conclusion - your wife is on her deathbed, and you're looking back over your cherished memories with her. When it fades out, it really does feel like a sunset. In the money ending, you just take off and leave everything behind. There's no real feeling that you've reached a conclusion. Maybe that's just the nature of living a life based solely on work, though! The compromise ending seemed the least conclusive, though: your son is introduced as a new character, and Melissa is in perfectly good health. But before you even get to learn your son's name (or maybe I just missed it), you get a message that your life has ended. It just seemed a bit sudden.

[superflat]

I enjoyed the gameplay a lot, the choices felt interesting, and the passing of time was well done.  I felt that the text needed some work though - it seemed a little heavy handed to me (the between-chapter titlecards especially.)  I wonder if you could convey the same ideas with less suggestive writing perhaps?

[jotapeh]

Cute - I think you've mentioned these in your todo list but the sprites with the mixed pixel sizes stick out like a sore thumb. And the quotes in between, yes, they are quite heavy handed as Jasper mentioned.

[mikewest]

@TheLastBanana
Thanks for the explanation.  That's a bit of the feel we were going for with each ending framed around either the past, present or future.  But like you said, only one feels like a real conclusion to the game.

@Jasper Bryne
You are right- we're going to start working on rewriting bits of it.

@jotapeh
Yeah, we've had some trouble representing people/things at the right proportions without cheating.  We started drawing the second chapter of the game at pretty low resolution and ended up getting locked into that.  I assume most of the sprite trouble was in that second chapter? Did any particular sprites jump out as needing to be reworked so as to not break the experience?


Thanks for all the feedback!

[Sean_L]

[...]I felt that the text needed some work though - it seemed a little heavy handed to me (the between-chapter titlecards especially.)  I wonder if you could convey the same ideas with less suggestive writing perhaps?

[...] And the quotes in between, yes, they are quite heavy handed as Jasper mentioned.

Mostly my fault here (I did a decent portion of the dialogue and text); I erred more on the side of making sure people definitely got the message instead of saying 'what's the connection here', but I see completely where you're coming from: the more I stare at the transitions the more I feel like it's punching me in the face.

It's sort of tough because mentally I try and weigh the people that will be turned off by the heavyhanded text versus those that won't get the connections and transitions at all. Especially in releasing to the general public - Kongregate, for example - I wonder if more people will be discerning or miss the overall context. The meta, I guess?

But you guys are right and I think reworking it to be more metaphorical instead of direct is a good start - it's been reuploaded with less irritating text and a -lot- of bug fixes, and a notable feature: the achievement room!

[mikewest]

Thanks again for all the feedback!  We tried to implement as much as we could while still adding the content we had planned to add.  It's officially on kongregate here, so let's call it version 1.0.  Even though we debugged amongst ourselves, I'd be surprised if there aren't things that need a little fixing still...but we're calling it "Finished" anyway.

Any new feedback would be appreciated.  We definitely look forward to posting our next game a bit earlier in the development process, so we can better incorporate feedback 

[nahkranoth]

I like the graphics, nice background animation.
Also a modest everyday story, witch works great. A bit too short to really make you feel your dicisions have an effect and to really get commited to, but overall not bad.

Nice music, verry well captured the atmosphere of the game in sound.

Please change the font of the inbetween screens to something more pixely.
I know it fits your atmposphere well, but your communicating in pixel style throughout the game, so why not there either? I like the quotes, it fits the feeling of the game.

Overall i think it was not a bad experience to play it; i don't feel like doing it again, but it was a nice experience and a sweet story.

[mikewest]

@nahkranoth
Thanks for the feedback.  We'll check out some sans serif, more pixely fonts to see how they look in context.

[SirEel]

Really well done: There is a bug it the middle section though, if you're holding right when you pick up clothes in the house, you jump backwards... try it, you'll see what I mean.

the perfect love ending made me ;_; and I loved the bit about not having the money for the flowers - that was a nice touch.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm tired or something, but in the perfect money ending I didn't understand who the other guy was meant to be...

[mikewest]

@SirEel
Ek! You are right about the stairs.  The time spent walking up/down the stairs should probably shortened too.  For the money ending, do you mean the guy you talk to about the will?  We tried to make three separate, but intertwining stories based on the choices you make.  You end up being a lawyer for the couple in the love ending.  Was it that the introduction of that plot element was a bit hurried?

[SirEel]

Oh! now I see. Yes, it wasn't quite clear that the person you end up being coexists with the others. I think the problem for the money/love ending men is apart from clothes, they look exactly the same. I think I might have just been being a bit dense.

...stairs? I didn't say anything about stairs...

[mikewest]

@SirEel
Right, yes, you didn't say stairs.  My brain likes to play tricks on me - sorry about that.  For whatever reason,  I thought you were talking about a different bug with the clothing and staircase upstairs in the home.  But indeed, you are quite right about the jumping back upon picking up an article of clothing.  Looks there is just a weird reset position line of code - thanks for pointing it out.
Yeah, the characters could use a bit more differentiation.  We had some time constraints, but hopefully in a near future version, we'll remedy that.